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Sam Gershman

@gershbrain.bsky.social
11K followers 67 following 983 posts

Professor, Department of Psychology and Center for Brain Science, Harvard University gershmanlab.com

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Reposted by Sam Gershman
Vivian Paulun @vivianpaulun.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
🚨 Preprint alert! 👶🧠🌊 "The Emergence of a Distinction between Things and Stuff" osf.io/preprints/ps... So excited to share my first infant study, with the wonderful Sanghee Song and Liz Spelke.🎉 Do babies expect sand to behave differently from solid objects? 🧵1/5
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I'm excited about this work that an amazing undergrad, @ariazhang.bsky.social, did with me and @tomerullman.bsky.social: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Aria showed how a neural net can discover abstractions for intuitive physics and use its own reliability estimates to decide when to deploy them.
biorxiv.org
Reliability-guided meta-control in intuitive physics
Intuitive physical reasoning is an important part of daily life, but the computations underlying it remain debated. Some prominent accounts propose intuitive physics relies on mental simulation, with ...
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Jay Hennig @jhennig.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Amazing work by @sromeropinto.bsky.social ! Sandra found that in Pavlovian tasks with hidden states, neural population dynamics in mouse OFC resemble beliefs/state-inference
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
This is interesting, but I'm having trouble with parts of the argument. It says that the same phenomena support both radical positions, but it doesn't seem to be the same phenomena. The data from newborn chicks supports nativism, but the "data" from ML support empiricism. These are different.
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Ryan Truong @heyodogo.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
We present PlayTrain, a new Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework that reimagines how we build video-game environments for RL by harnessing LLMs’ ability to write JavaScript games. PlayTrain turns single-file JS browser games into RL environments ready for efficient training.
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Pay attention to Arthur: he’s breathing fresh life into psychophysics.
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Arthur Prat @arthurpr4t.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
We derived six laws of psychophysics from a single efficient-coding equation. The laws include Weber's law; scaling laws in visual working memory (which had been noted before, but with unclear theoretical justification); Wei & Stocker's law of human perception; arthurprat.com/pdfs/Prat-Ca...
arthurprat.com
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Momchil Tomov @momchiltomov.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Excited to share that our paper on explainable AI for autonomous driving is out today in @nature.com! Super proud to have been part of this amazing collaboration between Motional and MIT! Details in the 🧵
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Naomi Saphra @nsaphra.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Yes, some people are worse at writing than an LLM. Those people are also usually incoherent thinkers. If they learned to write better, they would get better at thinking.
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
If this makes you mad, submit your cognitive science research to @openmindjournal.bsky.social No APCs, no subscription fees. It's funded by university libraries, at low cost.
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
@arthurpr4t.bsky.social has a new preprint with important results on a famous psychophysical law (Weber's law). It isn't, in fact, a law, because it can be broken. A more fundamental principle (efficient coding) shows when and why Weber's law holds true. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
Efficient coding makes and breaks Weber's law
Weber's law is a rare quantitative regularity in psychology, yet its origins remain debated. Here we provide causal evidence that it arises from the more fundamental principle of efficient coding. Thi...
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hombrecerebro.bsky.social @hombrecerebro.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Harvard Neurobiology + Kempner are hiring a tenure-track Assistant Professor in computational neuroscience. The search is broad; researchers combining computational and experimental work (including nonhuman-primate research) should apply! academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/16615
academicpositions.harvard.edu
Assistant Professor of Neurobiology
The Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University invite applications for a tenure tra...
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Cool work by @amirzur.bsky.social, @rdhawkins.bsky.social and their collaborators replicating our finding on causal implicatures from correlational language, and showing that this can arise from rational pragmatic inference: escholarship.org/content/qt60...
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arXiv cs.HC Human-Computer Interaction @cshc-bot.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Lance Ying, William Van Uitert, Tan Zhi-Xuan, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Samuel J. Gershman: Pragmatic Reasoning in Design arxiv.org/abs/2607.26322 arxiv.org/pdf/2607.26322 arxiv.org/html/2607.26322
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arXiv cs.MA Multiagent Systems @csma-bot.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Lance Ying, Ryan Truong, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Samuel J. Gershman: Using Theory of Mind to Arbitrate between Social and Non-social Learning arxiv.org/abs/2607.28601 arxiv.org/pdf/2607.28601 arxiv.org/html/2607.28601
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
Sometimes my kids are so out to lunch they literally forget to eat the lunch I packed them.
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David Colaço @davidcolaco.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
For those interested in memory transfer (the topic of my book): #16mmfilmography (avgeeks.bsky.social) hosts The Way Out Men, a documentary that features James V. McConnell studying his cannibal worms (featured at 9:45): 16mmfilmography.org/film/the-way... #hps #philsky
16mmfilmography.org
The Way Out Men (Part One) — 16mm Filmography
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
I'm really excited about this work. In addition to a new genome assembly for Stentor, we show through transcriptomics that a pathway for long-term depression (in neurons) is involved in mechanosensory habituation... despite the cell having no synapses!
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
This is a really interesting and important study: www.nature.com/articles/s41... However, isn't it concerning that sweeping conclusions about functional organization of cortex are being reached on the basis of a single task?
nature.com
Rarely categorical, highly separable representations along the cortical hierarchy - Nature
Cortical circuits prioritize diversity over categorical structure, supporting a computational regime geared towards high-dimensional, highly separable neural representations.
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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 16/07/2026
calling all researchers who collect data from humans 🧠🧪 we are running a very brief survey (<1 min) about jsPsych, the software ecosystem for browser-based data collection. if you use jsPsych, or if you collect data with any other software, please fill it out at tinyurl.com/jspsych-census!
I am writing on behalf of the leadership of jsPsych, the software ecosystem for browser-based data collection used in experiments and surveys from many labs worldwide.

It has been difficult for us to figure out how widespread jsPsych usage is, because the software is freely available online and we do not collect any information about downloads, users, experiments posted online, etc. While the software has been cited in thousands of articles, jsPsych usage is likely more widespread than those citations imply, because not every project using jsPsych leads to a citation, and because there are also often substantial delays between actual jsPsych usage and a publication. As such, we are conducting a very brief census of jsPsych users.

If you collect data from humans using jsPsych or any other type of software, we would appreciate your filling out a very brief survey (<1 min) at tinyurl.com/jspsych-census. This will help us to understand how many people, labs, and institutions are current or former users of jsPsych, information that will help support the long-term sustainability of the jsPsych ecosystem.

We would also appreciate it if you could circulate this message to your lab, your department listserv, and your collaborators, to help ensure that it reaches as many members of the research community as possible. The survey is being distributed by Josh de Leeuw, Melissa Kline Struhl, and myself. Please contact me (sam@auckland.ac.nz) off-list if you have any questions about it.
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Claire L. Evans @theuniverse.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
I was lucky enough to spend a few days at the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics recently, observing an interdisciplinary group of scientists as they grappled with the limits of language in the face of biological complexity. My scene report: clairelevans.substack.com/p/report-fro...
clairelevans.substack.com
Report from Goleta
An account of three days haunting the halls of the Institute for Theoretical Physics.
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Liu, Shuze @liushuze.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
We're looking for volunteers for our #CCN2026 community event's live problem-solving demos! Join a 10min think-aloud session solving an everyday planning task or playing a video game, and help kick off our panel discussions. 🎬 🙌 Please sign up here if you're interested: forms.gle/D7HNwFE1pet9...
forms.gle
CCN 2026 Naturalistic Problem Solving event interest form
Please fill out this form if you're interested in attending our community event at CCN 2026! No sign-up required to join, but an RSVP helps us get a headcount. Time: Wednesday, 5th August 2026, 16:0...
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
I've seen attempts to rehabilitate BF Skinner, arguing that he was unfairly maligned (most famously by Chomsky), that he was caricatured by cognitive scientists. I was surprised to hear even Josh Tenenbaum say that Skinner wasn't so bad. So I picked up "Science and Human Behavior" to see for myself.
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Liu, Shuze @liushuze.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
Do people solve hard problems by first building a mental model, then searching for the best solution? With @gershbrain.bsky.social, our new manuscript suggests a different route: people often start by retrieving cached solutions, and scaffold representations around them. osf.io/preprints/ps...
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Tomer Ullman @tomerullman.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
Now out (for realz) in Cognition: "People Make Graded Judgments About The Inconceivable" (by Hu, Sosa, & me) Free preprint: www.tomerullman.org/papers/grade... Journal link: bit.ly/gradedInconCog @jennhu.bsky.social @cognitionjournal.bsky.social
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languagemit.bsky.social @languagemit.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
A brief history of Open Mind 2013: Dick Aslin was disillusioned with Cognition (Elsevier). Nick Lindsay (MIT Press) wanted to create an open access cognitive science journal Nick contacted Dick, and Open Mind started. Editorial, February 2017, issue 1 of Open Mind direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...
direct.mit.edu
Editorial
I am extremely pleased that Open Mind has gone from concept to reality with this inaugural issue of our first volume. It has been a long road. Nick Lindsay at MIT Press had a vision for creating an op...
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Arthur Prat @arthurpr4t.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
To adapt to a new prior, tuning curves should "move" toward more frequent stimuli ('prior attraction'). But in adaptation studies they are shown to move away from the more frequent stimuli ('adapter repulsion'). Oh also how do tuning curves move at all?? www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Fast efficient coding and sensory adaptation in gain-adaptive recurrent networks - Nature Communications
How sensory systems rapidly adapt to changing stimulus statistics remains unclear. Here the authors show that gain adaptation in recurrent networks can implement fast efficient coding, unifying prior ...
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Natalia Vélez @natvelali.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
It feels strange to share good news, but: I’m moving to UCSD in July!! 🥳 I'm very grateful for my time at Princeton and SO excited for what comes next. We're building multiplayer games to study how teams are shaped by the problems they solve. If that sounds fun to you, I'm accepting grad students!
Paragliders hover between the cliffs and sea in Torrey Pines Gliderport, La Jolla, CA, USA. Photo credit Micah Fluhart for Unsplash.
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languagemit.bsky.social @languagemit.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
—— Open Mind is MIT Press’s Diamond Open Access Cognitive Science journal. We now have our first Impact Factor: 2.9 as of June 2026 Submit your papers to Open Mind direct.mit.edu/opmi
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Liu, Shuze @liushuze.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Join us at both conferences this summer! Our #CogSci2026 workshop features a series of invited talks on problem representations and abstractions. Our #CCN2026 community event opens a broader discussion on naturalistic problem solving: frameworks, tasks, methods, and where the field should go next.
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Alicia Chen @aliciamchen.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
New paper with @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social "Expectations of reciprocal generosity are specific to equal relationships," in @openmindjournal.bsky.social. Thread below! Article: doi.org/10.1162/opmi... MIT News: news.mit.edu/2026/would-y...
news.mit.edu
Would you return a favor? Scientists say it depends on the relationship
People generally only engage in reciprocal generosity with others of equal or unknown status, MIT researchers experimentally demonstrated. During repeated interactions between people of different soci...
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bioRxiv Cell Biology @biorxiv-cellbio.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
A quantitative portrait of habituation in Stentor coeruleus www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…
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Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo @multicellgenome.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
1/11 When we think about learning, we think about brains. Neurons.
Animals. But what if learning began much earlier? Our paper in PRXLife, led by @maorknak.bsky.social explores whether a unicell relative of animals can use environmental cues to anticipate future stress. 🧵 Link: go.aps.org/4vAU56R
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Quanta Magazine @quantamagazine.org · 05/06/2026
In the 60s, an eccentric behavioral psychologist named James McConnell pureed a bunch of worms and fed them to other worms. For years after, he claimed that the cannibal worms learned the ground-up worms’ memories. Could he have been… right? www.quantamagazine.org/are-memories...
quantamagazine.org
Are Memories Transferable — or Edible? | Quanta Magazine
In the 1960s, worm-training experiments and their strange implications captivated the nation. Columnist Claire L. Evans follows the neuroscientists who attempted to recapture the magic.
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cogscikid.bsky.social @cogscikid.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
Task diversity is supposedly key to generalization in RL. But what does it do to continual RL, where agents face one new task distribution after another? We find that past a point, more diversity actually inhibits continual reinforcement learning 🧵
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
This paper is absolutely wild and amazing. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
science.org
Homing pigeon navigation relies on superparamagnetic macrophages under overcast conditions
Birds use a variety of navigational strategies, including the geomagnetic field, especially when other cues are not available, such as under overcast or nocturnal conditions. Magnetite particles in th...
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Ashley Thomas @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
Hi everyone! My paper on cognitive representations of relationships and their developmental origins is finally out! I had a blast responding to the commentary and was honored to be able to engage with people who laid the foundation for my research program. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
Cognitive representations of social relationships and their developmental origins | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core
Cognitive representations of social relationships and their developmental origins - Volume 49
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bioRxivpreprint @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
Error-driven representation learning in the mesolimbic system www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
I totally agree, science is not a simple optimization problem, or at least not in the form conceived by most existing systems. @battleday.bsky.social and I wrote about this recently from a somewhat different perspective (emphasizing the 'problem problem'): gershmanlab.com/pubs/Battled...
gershmanlab.com
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Alison Gopnik @alisongopnik.bsky.social · 17/05/2026
So pleased that our paper on empowerment and causal models is out and freely available as part of this impressive special issue on world models and AI, with Melanie Mitchell, Josh Tenenbaum, Tom Griffiths and many other stars. royalsocietypublishing.org/rsta/article...
royalsocietypublishing.org
World models, artificial general intelligence and the hard problems of life–mind continuity: toward a unified understanding of natural and artificial intelligence
Abstract. This special issue examines how natural and artificial intelligences (AIs) model the world, and what this modelling reveals about cognition and r
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Jay Hennig @jhennig.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
🥳 Super excited to share our lab's first preprint, led by @hungyun.bsky.social "Distinct tasks engage shared neural subspaces in human hippocampus and anterior cingulate cortex" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵(1/9)
biorxiv.org
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
Someone needs to stop these madmen. www.reddit.com/r/Professors...
reddit.com
From the Professors community on Reddit
Explore this post and more from the Professors community
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
I think preferences for active asset management arise from a failure to distinguish skill and luck, perhaps the greatest destroyer of wealth. It's also what creates conditions for "cognitive arbitrage" by asset managers.
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
In FY24, the Harvard Management Corporation (responsible for the university endowment) paid $89M in compensation: paddockpost.com/2026/02/10/e... During this same period, the endowment underperformed the S&P500 by about $4B.
paddockpost.com
Executive Compensation at Harvard Management (2024)
Harvard Management Company (Harvard Management) provides investment management services to Harvard, a private university with more than $60 billion in net assets.  Consequently, revenue comes from …
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Deepa Rajan, PhD @deeparajan.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
Link to paper in @CurrentBiology. Thank you to co-authors @aralbright.bsky.social @gautamdey.bsky.social and more. @ucsfhealth.bsky.social @ucsfmedicine.bsky.social @uofcalifornia.bsky.social www.cell.com/current-biol...
cell.com
Molecular pathways for learning in the single-cell Stentor coeruleus
Rajan et al. explore the molecular basis of habituation in the unicellular organism Stentor coeruleus using a combination of pharmacological methods, proteomics, transcriptomics, and RNAi. These exper...
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megan peters 🧠 @meganakpeters.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
🚨🚨JOB ALERT🚨🚨 I'm hiring a cogsci/philosophy/compneuro postdoc at @ucl.ac.uk @uclbrainscience.bsky.social @uclpals.bsky.social! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRH486/p... Come to London & work on frameworks for "testing" for consciousness using Bayesian belief updating & latent variable modeling. Pls share!
jobs.ac.uk
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UCL
Discover Postdoctoral Research Fellow jobs and more in higher education on jobs.ac.uk. Apply for further details on the top job board.
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Arthur Prat @arthurpr4t.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
The "Version of Record" of my paper with Mike Woodford is finally there. I am very glad with this paper that points to new laws of psychophysics, which we derived from a carefully considered principle of endogenous efficient coding.
elifesciences.org
Endogenous precision of the number sense
A theory of efficient coding wherein the precision of representations is endogenous, task-dependent, and prior-dependent predicts scaling laws for imprecision and is supported by numerosity perception...
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
New work w/ Zach Kelso and @madeleinecsnyder.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Our negative results on classical conditioning in planarian flatworms. This was surprising, given the long history of work (including sensational findings of memory transfer and retention through decapitation).
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
There seems to be a broad perception across psychology and neuroscience that work shouldn't be "too technical" in order to reach the broadest possible audience. While I think we should strive for accessibility, I feel that this attitude can also be self-defeating: why are we dumbing down?
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
To accompany my textbook (Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience) and the class I taught this semester, I'm open-sourcing my lectures slides: gershmanlab.com/lectures.html I'll continue to update these as I improve them.
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